Wezit partnership brings Sketchfab to Museum Apps

We’re excited to announce that Sketchfab is now a proud partner in the Wezit ecosystem!

Wezit provides a powerful platform for museums, art galleries and other cultural institutions to help audiences access their digital content in some amazing ways.

Using clever GPS, beacon and image recognition tools (among many other systems) Wezit enables the culturally inclined to explore physical venues – indoors and outside – and discover engaging content along the way. Their platform also gives the publishing institutions the power to update their Wezit based apps, touchscreens, kiosks and signage at any time – publish a new scan or VR scene to Sketchfab and seamlessly push it to all your onsite and online visitors.

Here’s one of our early prototypes to show a Wezit app dynamically pulling 3D from Sketchfab:

That’s not all though – on top of providing a transmedia solution for digital content, Wezit also delivers workshops to help interested parties navigate and explore all the possibilities of the very latest technologies – everything from geo-location to virtual and augmented reality – at their open innovation lab, Wezitcamp. In the rest of this post, Wezit shares some insights into AR and VR produced as part of their Wezit Camp session at the Museum Computer Network Conference earlier this year…

The Dos and Don’ts of great AR and VR experiences

AR and VR have been around long enough now to allow us to evaluate their uses within cultural institutions. This is precisely what a bunch of museum professionals did at the last Museum Computer Network Conference in Pittsburgh. Wezit attended the event and extracted three top tips from this rich conversation:

Don’t compromise contentTechnology is a great tool, but it is just a tool. Getting an AR or VR experience should not be an end in itself for your institution. Content is king (or queen as the panel pointed out) and having clear objectives that match your museum’s mission is essential; so focus on quality content! “It doesn’t have to be perfect to be meaningful” remarked Andrea Montiel de Schuman from the Detroit Institute of Arts. As a matter of fact, during their testing phases with the audience, several museum professionals noticed that the experience that had the most tech issues ended up being visitors’ favourites because the content was meaningful.

Form partnershipsAR and VR can be extremely costly. Forming partnerships with other organizations as well as with tech companies can be a great way to offer a meaningful and high-quality experience. As a matter of fact, Brian Dawson from the Canada Science and Technology Museums Corporation argued that “working with firms as partner (rather than service provider) [had] yielded the best results.” Forming partnerships with such firms make them an official solution-finder but also ensures that the quality of the experience will please the modern day’s gamers. All the speakers agreed that having strategic partnerships is essential for a successful project.

Don’t forget to test, test, testIt is absolutely crucial to test your ideas and to test them with your target audience. Prototypes for your AR or VR experiences do not need to look perfect, they are prototypes after all. “Experimental is okay”, claimed Erica Gangsei from SFMOMA. Testing with your audience will allow you to fine tune the experience according to their understandings, expectations and tastes. At the end of the day, your experience must match both the story you want to tell and the audience you wish to say it to.

What are the Dos and Don’ts of VR and AR that you have experienced within your institution? Feel free to share your stories with us via the comment box below.

If you work at a cultural institution and want to find out more about Wezit please please contact: Ségolène Valençot via contact@wezit.io, and for help getting started sharing 3D on Sketchfab drop a message to museums@sketchfab.com.

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About Sketchfab

Sketchfab for Cultural Heritage

In the Cultural Heritage page, we invite our 450+ museums and cultural institutions to talk about their use of 3D and VR to promote their collections. Sketchfab supports these institutions with free Business accounts. Please visit sketchfab.com/museums for more information.